Oddbean

>You're offering Straw Man arguments, which is part of the very odd and delusional mentality of people who are breathless Nostr enthusiasts. Correct me if I'm misunderstanding your point. I wouldn't call myself a "nostr enthusiast". I just use it and plan on building something with it because I see it as the most likely to work going forward. >"My" solution is not to use "burner accounts" it is to create an environment where people are free to offer services efficiently (server farms etc) and not to run from the problem by building things like Noster, that even if it worked, would not address and fix the persistent problem which is the power to detain people arbitrarily, the same way Durov has been detained. What would that environment look like? I imagine it would involve either major political shifts or a protocol that can link together all the service providers and make them hot swappable from a user perspective. >Having a normie CEO is very much sustainable and has been the norm for most of the history of the services on the Internets, and your "money pit" argument is just economic illiteracy. YouTube is profitable, in case you didn't know, and LiveLeak persisted for years before being sold. YouTube was the main video platform for over a decade before it turned a profit. It only survived because it was bought by Google and they could afford to lose money on it for a long time. Look at all the alternates youtubers keep trying to build like Nebula and floatplane. They can't reach the efficiency of YouTube and they only exist because they charge money. Look up the costs of streaming video because it's the most expensive thing you can possibly offer for free on the internet. >And the argument, "They're just going to stop it anyway" is the exact argument people use against new ideas, even PGP, "The government can get into anything, it cannot possibly be secure". Thankfully the people who know how things actually work are also the people taking the action to do things. That includes Nostr by the way, which may end up solving problems for some people, whilst leaving the problem of the violent thugs untouched. This is where you misunderstand what I'm saying and I would appreciate if you understand. I'm not saying to be a defeatist about freedom, I'm saying we need something that has the capability of winning. It's great that there's lots of people providing services that increase freedom, but unless they are linked together, they don't create lasting progress past their own lifespan. If the rumble CEO burns through $1 billion hosting rumble for a decade and creates the most free and open platform in the process, increasing freedom for millions, that won't translate into much except a freedom culture when it finally goes away. The reason we need a protocol is that you can still have the same situation, but at the end you don't lose much progress. We are seeing it right now. Nostr relays are a money pit. They are selfless ventures that cost money to maintain. The difference is that even when all the free relays existing now shut down, people can start hosting their own notes, or pay a few pennies for a paid relay. Then all their followers and audience that they built up can keep watching/reading their content from the same app without a hitch. It carries the progress created by those relay operators into the future, even if they go broke or go to prison. >"Rumble is still small" is yet another fallacious objection. People react like this with nonsense when you "attack" their pet hobby, in this case Nostr. They put up stupid arguments, fallacies and gibberish trying to score points and "Gotchas". It's really very silly and tiresome. I have nothing against rumble. I use it and love their mission. I say they are small as a matter of fact. You can afford to sustain a small money pit. You can't do the same if it becomes YouTube. I think a so far implicit assertion I've been making might be our main point of disagreement. 1. I don't believe any freedom tech will be able to sustain itself with ads, especially if it involves streaming video. 2. Anything that costs money to consume content will never go mainstream and actually move the broader narrative. This is because you won't pay for something unless you already agree with it. If you disagree with either of those, please reply to them instead of anything else as everything else is a waste of time. >Once again thankfully there are many people working on this problem and as it was in the case of GPG, Bitcoin and GNU, it only takes a tiny handful of dedicated people to solve these big problems once and for all, and no one is persuaded by anon fallacies. I agree, all of those are technologies that are invented once and used going forward, building on the previous. PGP won't dissapear if they imprison the founder. Those are either technologies or protocols, not services. Rumble/telegram is more akin to Adam Back's Ecash. It was an amazing service that allowed anon payments over the internet, but it relied on a custodian bank and the government shut it down. We see the tech behind it used in some btc projects but the service died with the custodians. It didn't create any lasting change except the friends it inspired along the way (satoshi for example).